Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Making the decision to leave New Orleans was a no-brainer. The Museum knew we were there, and we’d never be able to make a plan and keep ourselves safe if we were always looking over our shoulders. Besides, two of the three board members lived in Europe. We had a pretty good idea of where to find Carapaz and Paar and decided to take them out first. Vance Gilchrist was a little more elusive, but we figured we’d deal with him when the time came. The first order of business was to strike Carapaz and Paar and do it fast, before they realized we were coming for them. That meant getting across the Atlantic and finding a safe house from which to plan and execute three missions. We needed a place that would be out of the way but with decent transport links, big enough for the six of us—and Kevin—and with enough privacy that we could plot a few murders without attracting unwanted attention. None of those things are particularly hard to find on their own, but all together? And with a limited budget? It seemed like a tall order until Helen spoke up.

“We could go to Benscombe,” she offered.

“Benscombe?” Akiko asked.

“A country house in the south of England,” Mary Alice told her. “It was our training ground. And probably not a great idea since it has a connection with the Museum,” she pointed out.

“Kind of a frying pan, fire situation,” Natalie agreed.

“But it doesn’t have a connection to the Museum, not anymore,” Helen said. “The organization never owned it. It was always the property of the Hallidays. When Constance died, it was inherited by a distant cousin who sold it. It changed hands several times.”

“Then how are we going to get in?” I asked.

“Well, because I own it,” Helen said. We stared at her in amazement as she hurried to explain. “Kenneth and I did a tour of England for our thirtieth wedding anniversary, and I thought it might be fun to show him. So we drove down, and as soon as we got there, I saw the noticeboard. It was for sale. I didn’t know it at the time, but Kenneth wrote down the agent’s details and made inquiries when we got back to the States. He cashed in his retirement and bought it as a surprise for me. Apparently he got quite a deal because nobody ever cleared it out. I think it’s been left as it was when Constance died.”

“You think?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I haven’t been inside. Things kept coming up and by the time we were ready to go and see about fixing it up, Kenneth got sick and there was no money. But the bottom line is that there is a property in England sitting empty.”

“We can’t use it if it’s in your name,” Mary Alice said.

Helen shook her head. “Kenneth bought the property in the name of a holding company for tax purposes. My name isn’t anywhere on it, and neither is his. It would take a good deal of research and a great deal of luck for anyone to find us.”

I looked around the group. “Then we’re off to England. Minka, Akiko needs a passport, and you’d better see about paperwork for Kevin as well. I’ll make the flight arrangements. Get your bags together, ladies. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

As we went our separate ways to pack up, I noticed Natalie slipping out the front gate, looking furtive. I decided to follow, heading out into the Quarter, walking with a baseball cap pulled low on my head and a scarf wrapped up to my chin. I was moving fast, catching up to Nat just as she crossed the street and disappeared through the entry gate into the Ursulines convent museum. I waited a minute and then followed, paying for my ticket and passing through the line of shrubbery in the courtyard and into the convent itself. It smelled of wood polish with a faint trace of incense. To the right were the tiny rooms that had been turned into a museum and to the left was the passageway leading to the chapel. It was anybody’s guess where she’d gone, but I mentally flipped a coin and headed left. Sure enough, she was sitting in the buff and blue chapel with its pretty rococo saints. The incense smell was stronger in here, mingling with the odor of the beeswax votives lit by the faithful. I slid into the pew next to her.

We didn’t say anything for a long minute, just stared up at the starry blue ceiling. Next to us was a statue of a woman dressed in white and purple, her dark hair crowned with roses. She carried a skull resting on a book and seemed to be making a beckoning gesture with her hand.

“What are you doing here, Nat?”

“I’m communing with my girl Mary,” she said, nodding towards the statue. “Two nice Jewish girls hanging out together. I like her skull.”

“Sure. I can see that,” I said. “Except that’s St. Rosalia of Palermo. Pretty sure she was Catholic.”

“Well, shit.” Natalie slumped in the pew. “I can’t even get that right.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

She seemed to be having some sort of argument with herself about whether to confide. She decided to trust me, I suppose, because she tucked her hands in between her thighs and took a deep breath. “I wanted to be with my people. Only the nearest synagogue is like an hour walk, so I came here. Catholics understand community, you know? And they get guilt too.”

“You’re sixty and you’re finally feeling guilty over something?” I asked. I was only half joking.

“I’m sixty and I never stopped,” she told me. “I’m a woman. Guilt is our birthright. Guilt if we want to be mothers, guilt if we take the Pill instead or choose to abort. Guilt if we stay home with our kids or guilt if we work. Guilt if we sleep with a man, guilt if we say no. Guilt if we’re lucky enough to survive for no good reason. I’m so damned sick of it. I’ve never been so tired of anything in my life. I just . . . I just want to go to sleep forever.”

“That won’t get you out of the guilt,” I said. “I’m pretty sure somewhere in the afterlife, some woman is feeling ashamed of herself because her cloud isn’t as silver as the angel next door’s.”

She almost smiled but didn’t quite manage it. “I suppose that’s part of the reason I’ve always hated you. You never seem to struggle with it.”

“You’ve always hated me? This is quite a time to find out, Natalie. We’ve known each other for four decades. I’ve literally trusted you with my life.”

“And you still can. That’s the job. I’d jump in front of a bullet for you and you know it. Besides, only a small part of me hates you. A tiny, tiny part of me.”

“What, like a mustard seed of hate?”

“Chia. I have a chia seed of hate. Get with the times,” she said, smiling a little.

“You have a chia seed of hate for me. Want to tell me about it?”

She picked at her fingernails. “I always wondered how you managed to just ease through without ever being touched by it all.”

“By what?”

“The job. What we do. Who we are. It should leave scars, don’t you think? I’ve got some. Helen does. Mary Alice does. But you don’t seem fazed by it.”

“Nat, that’s some mark of Cain shit and I don’t believe in it. What we do for a living doesn’t strip us of our souls or make us terrible people. We’re exterminators.”

“That’s really how you see it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you sleep well at night?”

I thought about that. “Most of the time. Look, if you’d have asked me when I was seven years old and playing with a flea market Barbie knock-off what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’m pretty sure assassin wouldn’t have made the top ten list. But it’s what I do. And I do it well. And when I’m finished with a job, the world is that much safer,” I said, holding up my thumb and forefinger, a quarter of an inch apart. “Maybe at the end of a mission I’ve stopped a trafficker from getting his hands on some eleven-year-old who will get to sleep in her own bed that night. Maybe I’ve prevented an arms deal that would have wiped out a settlement of villagers who won’t have anything more to worry about than getting their crops in the ground. Or maybe I’ve broken up a cartel that terrorized people into leaving their homes so they could have free run of the farmland to grow their shitty crops. I think about the people we’ve saved before I sleep.”

She was quiet, looking at her new friend, St. Rosalia, for a while before she turned back to me. “I should have called him. Sweeney, I mean. I should have called him and maybe asked him out for dinner. I should have asked him to stay for breakfast. Hell, I should have at least slept with him again.”

“Really? Was he that good?”

She shrugged. “Average-sized dick but he really knew what to do with it. I just feel bad I dodged him. And now I won’t have the chance to let him know that he was pretty good.”

I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “You know,” I told her, “most of the decorations here are trompe l’oeil. All those moldings and stars aren’t wood or plaster. They’re just paint. They’re not really there, but it looks like they are and that’s enough for people.”

She turned to me. “Really? Metaphors?”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

“Sweeney’s dead,” she said. “And it was a shitty way to go.”

“He made his choice. He chose wrong. Unless you think you’d have done any differently if he’d pointed a gun at you.”

She forced herself to take a deep breath and shake off the gloom. “I’d have killed the asshole with my bare hands. You were right to take him.”

I cupped my hand over my ear. “Say that again. The part about me being right.”

She nudged my shoulder with hers. “Bitch.”

“Said with love?”

“Always.” She breathed deeply, a slow, tired breath. “I kind of wish we could stay here, you know? Get Minka to make us up some new identities. Maybe get jobs. Turn the page and write some new story. Just walk away from it all.”

“Okay, let’s call that door number one,” I said evenly. “But we’ve already agreed on door number two. If I remember, you were pretty enthusiastic.”

I looked at St. Rosalia’s sweet smile and unnaturally long toes. And then I shifted my gaze to the front of the church to the statue of St. Michael. He was a very casual St. Michael, one arm upraised like he was hailing a cab, his hair tousled by an invisible wind. But his spear was thrust right through the heart of the dragon at his feet. The sculptor had caught it in its death throes, head back, tongue lolling out as it gasped its last breath. It looked pretty cheap; I was pretty sure I could order something better from the Toscano catalog. But that wasn’t the point.

“He knew what the job was,” I said, pointing to St. Michael. “Get in, kill the bastard. Get out alive.”

She nodded. “Door number two.” She lifted her pinky and I linked it with mine.

“Door number two.”